WordPress 3 Search Engine Optimization

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As mentioned, some links give you more link juice than the others, so if possible, go for quality links. The more difficult is to get a link, the more value it has. This is nothing to be too concerned about, since only those who pay for links are likely to be penalized for the frequency or speed of link acquisition. Basically, if too many links start to lead to your site, it may look suspicious. So, if you start gaining three to four links on a daily basis and this goes on for a period of time, it can indicate a potential problem or it may put your site under closer scrutiny.

Without addressing these aspects, all your hard work can be rendered meaningless. As mentioned before, the SEO process is there to ensure better websites for everyone, so neglecting to supply a quality user experience for those who are surfing the web with their phones will score you negative points. Another aspect of a positive user experience is fast loading speed. The volume of people who come to your website and immediately leave without taking any action is called a bounce rate.

The speed of your website depends on your web hosting provider, the proximity of the user to the server where your site is uploaded and the theme used in your web design process. You can find both of these online by going through the reviews or articles that rank hosting providers and website theme templates.

In other words, the closer your potential visitors are to the server, the greater the chance they will discover your website and that your site will perform well during their browsing session. This is where a content delivery network or CDN can be of great help. With your website being omnipresent, you boost its visibility and your users from more distant locations can have the same satisfying experience as those who are in your proximity.

Search engines determine your rank based on the ranking signals. We mentioned some of those signals in the previous paragraph: However, to rank higher you also need a purpose, or to be precise, a particular niche in which you want to be ranked. These niches or categories are labeled with keywords, so SEO allows you to be ranked for a particular category by using appropriate keywords or keyword phrases.

In other words, you need to create your own ranking signals in order to be ranked for what you want to target dog food, real estate, health, exercise, etc. Here, we are going to explore what relevant ranking signals are and discuss how to create them. Here you basically use words to describe the uploaded content, and these words need to contain the keyword or keyword phrases you want that content to be ranked for.

This way, a search engine will know that the content is about, or related to, the chosen keyword. Do not duplicate title tags: They must be written differently for every page. Sub headings can also contain keywords, keyword synonyms or other topic-related words. The site name is not a ranking signal that will play an essential role in the ranking process, so feel free to name your website as you want.

Make your headline h1 tag different from the title tag: This is another opportunity to vary the keyword phrasing of your page and increase its chances of appearing for different search intent. User experience and conversion rate are also monitored, so you need to create engaging content for users, and ensure they become participants who share, comment and like the content, or they become paying customers. We are now going to address the issue of content more thoroughly and give an example of the type of content that has high-rank worthiness. Throughout the guide, quality content has been mentioned as an important and essential element, however, we never defined exactly what quality content implies.

For example, engaging content for gardening tips differs greatly from engaging content for gaming tips. Engaging content means that it can deliver what the readers expect. However, your content needs to be insightful above all, and higher or lower word count does not determine its insightfulness. You can write 2, words and say basically nothing or you can provide a lot of valuable information using only words. The best advice regarding the written content is to pick a topic where you can provide in-depth advice and create something meaningful that will exceed the 1, word count.

Unique content can also be defined as 2X or 10X content, which basically content that is two times or even 10 times better than anything else on the Internet on that topic. You can also take a different approach to make your content more unique. Basically, you use existing information and build your content upon it. So, the next logical step is to create a ranking system for those sites and provide information to users on the reliability and quality of sources and reviews. So, how is your content evaluated by search engines? Obviously keywords are still important because they are ranking signals.

Unfortunately, at one point their importance was stressed to such a degree that people stopped creating quality content. Their sites focused on high keyword density and they had individual pages that ranked for a particular keyword or keyword phrases. Because of this, Google altered its algorithm to prevent people from creating spam content on their website. Updates like Hummingbird, Penguin and Panda were created to ensure that the keywords were connected to topic relevance.

Keywords and keyword phrases are simply a way to start ranking for a particular category. There is no exact percentage on what would be a natural keyword density. Simply do not create content where your keyword is forced; if you can mention a single keyword or phrase 6 to 8 times in a text that contains 1, words that would be great.

Today, some website themes also come with a built-in SEO tool kit which allows you to monitor the keywords you use. Another word of advice, if your content is to appear natural you need to use keyword synonyms, as well. Basically, using only one specific keyword renders it useless, because in order for it to be truly effective, it needs to have the right environment.

Moreover, there are two types of topic-relevant keywords: The best thing to do is to use both sets of topic-relevant keywords in your text. These tools are already used by SEO companies, which is one of the reasons why the process is outsourced to them; you get all the best tools and expert opinions—and you save a lot of time.

One-time blog setup adjustments for WordPress onpage SEO

Last, there is an element of ranking difficulty for each keyword. Some keywords are strong and therefore, a lot of websites already rank for them. In other words, you should do thorough research on keyword strength and its ranking difficulty—and determine what tools are available to help you complete this process. Again, everything will be explained, but the basic mechanism behind links is that the more links you have that lead to your site or a particular page on your website, the more its authority will grow.

Of course, other factors affect link value. Without them, the system would be easily manipulated and you could basically pay for your rank or buy links, which is not something search engines want you to do. Basically, view anchor text as a minor bonus to your link value, but not something you should prioritize. This is an extremely important factor. Highly ranked websites and pages are more trustworthy, therefore external links that come from those sites add more authority to your website and content.

According to Andrey Lipattsev, Search Quality Senior Strategist at Google, high quality content and link building are the two most important signals used by Google to rank your website for search. A website that links to your site needs to be topical and relevant to your content. Basically, the two websites need to have a natural bond if the external links are to be considered valuable. Follow links to relevant websites generate authority points. Websites with no-follow links tend to be more trustworthy; there are no ulterior motives, so the information is usually more genuine on those sites.

10 WordPress SEO Questions That Took Me 10 Years To Answer!

Even if the links do not generate ranking points, they can still be a viable source of website visitors. That's why our onpage optimization checklist continues with having a responsive site. Therefore, if your site is still not mobile-friendly, you're leaving a lot of opportunities on the table and alienating the bigger part of your audience. That is, it still shows your current theme to your desktop visitors and displays a mobile-friendly website only for your mobile visitors. The best thing about this plugin is that it is designed to be as lightweight as possible, so even if your current site makes heavy use of a variety of Javascript, CSS and image files, which can increase the load time and consume a lot of mobile data, this plugin should reduce the load time because of its streamlined approach to serving optimized content to mobile visitors.

We are now actually getting to the optimization checklist of actual items on your page, post or article. Very important as part of your onpage seo techniques are you content headers. H1-H6 tags are a critical part of your on-page search engine optimization structure. For years now, those headings have been used to notify the reader and also the search engines what the hierarchy of the information on the page is, and what's more and less important. When it comes to the order in which the tags appear, apparently it's not that important.

Not just me saying, but Matt Cutts as well. If you're still not too sure about how to get this done, this lightweight SEO guide is a good and useful resource to help you figure it all out. When performing your on-page seo checklist, do make sure you've checked how fast your website loads. What this means in plain English is that you should do whatever it takes to make your site load as fast as possible. Even setting search engine rankings aside, good site speed will improve the overall experience that your audience has with the site.

How to make your site faster?

Question #1: I’ve Heard That WordPress Is Search Engine Optimized (Out-Of-The-Box). Is That True?

I'm afraid there's no one-sentence explanation to this. If you want one plugin which can do a signficant amout of difference to your website's speed though - do have a look at WP Rocket. Its our recommended plugin of choice to make your website faster incredibly quickly. It's not free - but it's well worth the investment! How to get fast WordPress website - a complete guide [21 actions]. What I am going to say, though, is that the best way to make your site faster is to simply switch to a faster hosting platform. Sometimes you just can't make up for the shortcomings of your web host by doing WordPress onpage SEO tweaks.

That's why changing your hosting provider is often the quickest and also the best solution. If you're looking for a great fast hosting service, we absolutely love InMotion hosting - we do strongly suggest you visit our review here. The list is kept up-to-date, so you can visit it in the future as well.

Let's move to the plugins department. The thing is that WP isn't that onpage SEO-friendly right out the gate, which leaves a lot of room for plugins to come in and fill the gaps. It gives you all the basic settings you'd need, and also lets you in on some of the advanced stuff, should you want to experiment. We dare say that this is the one on-page seo tool that you cannot do without. One thing that Yoast does not address in their plugin is Rich-Snippet schema markup, so you'll have to find another plugin which does that.

WPSuperStars have an excellent roundup of plugins you can use. While Yoast might be the most popular plugin out there, it doesn't mean it's the only one - and not necessarily the best one. As somebody who has been in the industry for a while, we are always on the looking for the next big thing, and we think we might have found a strong contender for the title of best plugin for on-page search engine optimization. Not only has it become popular, but it's rated 4.

And we don't say this only through third-party experience.

What is SEO?

We've actually used the plugin ourselves and have found it to be extremely useful, in certain aspects exceeding our expectations in terms of the suggestions it makes to users who are writing to make sure their content is fully-optimized for search engines and users! For example, the Focus extension allows you to find synonyms of your target keywords, such that you write content both Google and your users will love, without exceeding the recommended keyword density and also writing naturally.

You can do it by trial and error. You may hit a jackpot. Or you may not. The right way to find the good keywords with little competition is by using Long Tail Pro. Recommended plugin for increasing Facebook Likes on your Facebook fan page: Sumo is a great and free tool to do so. If your site isn't mobile-friendly, this plugin will fix this. It simply switches between your standard design and a mobile-optimized version based on the device that the visitor is using to access the site.

The plugin works on autopilot and it's completely free. The mobile design it delivers is clear and good-looking. In short, a great free solution if you don't want to rebuild your whole theme. After you've thought about search engine optimization, or maybe even before , you'll need to focus on converting any existing visitors. We've found the best WordPress popup plugin to help you build your email list and improve conversion rates.

Because of course, after you've increased your organic traffic, you need to have excellent conversion methods in place. So these techniques are ones that you can implement right now long-term commitment not required. Obviously, there are plenty of other techniques, but this is a great place to start. That said, many of these strategies should also help you on other sites, such as Yahoo Search or Bing. Since Google takes speed into account when ranking sites, a good host can help push you to the top of the SERPs. Your host also affects the amount of downtime your site experiences and the physical distance between servers and visitors — both of which are ranking factors.

A smart way to go is with a WordPress-specific hosting plan, such as our own DreamPress packages. These fully-managed plans provide impressive speeds and little to no downtime. The way a theme was developed also matters since clean code gives your site the best chance in SERPs. You may also want to look for a theme that offers features specifically designed to improve your SEO, such as new heading tag options. Fortunately, there are plenty of themes available that fit the bill.

These are small pieces of add-on software you can install , which add new features and functionality to your site. For even better results, you can also opt for a comprehensive SEO plugin such as Yoast SEO , which will add a whole suite of optimization-focused features to your site. Be like the cool kids! Here are the most popular WordPress plugins for Clear, descriptive links that describe their content are easier for search engines to make sense of and tend to get a ranking boost. WordPress offers a number of automatic permalink options: A sitemap is a list of all the pages and other content on your website, usually organized into a hierarchy.

It provides a quick way to see how your site is laid out and what it includes. While these sitemaps were once designed to help users navigate websites, their primary purpose now is to communicate information to search engine bots also known as crawlers.

It enables crawlers to see all of the pages on your site and understand how they relate to one another. This makes it easier for search engines to index your site, and to present relevant content in user searches.

Because WordPress onpage Search Engine Optimization should become second nature

These are formatting options you can apply to section headings within pages and posts. You can see these settings in your WordPress editor, listed as Heading 1, Heading 2 , and so on:. Using these headings to structure your content accomplishes two things.

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